Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Short & Sweet tip - Machine Embroidery

This is a little tip if you are working on an embroidery sewing machine for a small project.  Sometimes it is just too small to hoop it so you need to get inventive.  I was working on a small coin purse kit I got from Mollie Makes Magazine (which I adore!)  It came with two small pieces of vintage fabric that were just big enough to fit the coin purse pattern with very little left over.

The back fabric was a little too stark and plain for me.  The example was to take a scrap from the flower fabric to hand stitch onto it so you could have a rose on it.  The scrap was so small I could get nothing out of it.  I decided that I would embroider a Monogram on my machine.  Obviously it was too small to hoop the fabric so I used a cut away stabilizer (the tear away stabilizer is not the best option because it can tear it self away if not hooped all the way around with a fabric).

After hooping the stabilizer I used the temporary spray adhesive on both the fabric and the stabilizer to ensure that they are secure.  When you spray just one side it can sometimes move around once the stitching starts which is exactly what you don't want.  Make sure to get some thing that says it is temporary and that will wash out.  The importance to that is so that you can
A. Get your fabric of
B. Not gunk up the needle on your
C. So that it will wash out and doesn't add bulk or stiffness where you may not want it.

After everything is hooped, sprayed and set into place you can go about with your embroidery.

For this particular coin purse it was suggested to line the vintage fabrics.  I used a typical fusible interfacing instead of trying to deal with a second interior lining fabric since it was such a small piece.  After my embroidery I clipped out all the excess stabilizer to keep as close to the monogram as possible.  if you look closely you can see the contrasting hatch marks inside the "E". 


Very simple coin purse and easy solution to fabric being too small to hoop for machine embroidery.

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